Until now, a single central regulator has been provided in wind farms, which uses the electrical actual values at the transfer point and the nominal values received from the public electricity grid system to determine presets for the operation of the individual wind energy installations. The individual wind energy installations adjust their operation in accordance with the presets. When added over all the wind energy installations, this leads to new electrical actual values at the transfer point, which the central regulator can in turn compare with the nominal values received from the public electricity grid system. This results in a closed control loop, in which the central regulator acts directly on the wind energy installations.
As wind farms are becoming ever larger, such centralized closed-loop control results in difficulties. The computation complexity obviously rises severely with the number of wind energy installations. Despite a high level of computation complexity, it is not possible to completely solve the problem that changes in the operation of a single wind energy installation may have widely differing effects on the electrical actual values at the transfer point, depending on how far the wind energy installation is away from the transfer point. The further a wind energy installation is away from the transfer point, the lower is the control quality and therefore the greater is the risk of instabilities in the control system.